A Necessary Evil
by BooksV.Cigarettes
Summary: Getting into bed with the enemy was the last thing she'd wanted to do. But it turned out sharing a bed with five con artists was... Educational to say the least. Eliot/OC


**Chapter One**

_**Right now**_

"Are you sure you want to do this?" He placed a hand at the small of her back; a gesture of support and protection. He wanted to protect her. She trembled involuntarily and hoped he would think it was because she was cold. She flashed him a breezy grin "It's like riding a bike. You never forget."

"I didn't ask if you were up to it," his voice was low and serious "I asked if you were sure you wanted to do it."

"Don't worry about me." Instinctively she checked her gun holsters.

"Too late."

"This is all very touching," an irritated voice in their ears piped up "but could we please try to focus on the situation at hand?"

"Not _now_ Hardison." He let out a small growl and gestured silently for her to remove her ear bud.

"Can it wait? It takes me twenty minutes to get this stupid thing back in!"

"Hey! Don't you be trash talkin' the hardware!"

"Hardison, _shut up_!" He reached up and plucked the comms device from her ear and clenched it in his fist along with his own.

"Stay close to me." His voice was low and urgent; almost pleading.

"Stay _close _to you? Don't be so absurd." She scoffed and turned away but he grabbed her wrists and turned her roughly to face him again "I mean it. I don't make a circle all by myself."

X

_**A while ago**_

"Proust tells us that 'the voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes'. What do you think this means?" silence from the twenty-four disinterested youths in front of her.

"Come on guys, this is really obvious." Still more silence.

She sighed "_Fine_. Write this down. All of it." Small groans and the shuffling of paper interrupted only by the shriek of the bell "Alright, you got out of it today but if you haven't come up with some good answers by next lesson there will be trouble!" she glared at the retreating forms of her students and shook her head resignedly before turning to the board in order to wipe away the pearls of wisdom she had attempted to cast in the previous hour.

"You look as though you could use a drink." A familiar face peered around the doorframe. She smiled.

"Don't flatter me, Karen. I look like I could use _several_ drinks."

"Happy hour?"

"Ah yes, the ironically named Happy hour – probably the most miserable and desperate sixty minutes of my week."

"I didn't ask for an obnoxious diatribe, lady. Are you coming or not?"

"Yes miss. Sorry miss."

X

"Do you think it's bad that this is the way we end our weeks now? With obscene amounts of alcohol?"

"Don't forget the chicken wings." Karen gestured to the huge platter of assorted fried goods they were steadily making their way through. She took a deep swig of her beer and shook her head "Look around you. This is Cape Cod, one of the most affluent areas of America. There isn't a student in any of your classes whose daddy isn't pulling in at least six figures a year – a good percentage of which goes on his nasty little kid's education. That puts a huge amount of pressure on us as teachers to perform. You know how most drummers are deaf by the time they're twenty-five? Well it's a known fact that in the Cape, most high school teachers have some sort of liver damage or substance abuse problem by the time they're thirty."

"So why do it?"

Karen grabbed one of her wrists and held it to her nose "Is that Chanel?"

She yanked her wrist back "_OK_, point taken."

"Face it, kid. The perks of being a teacher in the Cape are incredible – and they all come at the tiny cost of your sanity. So drink up." She nudged a bottle of beer across the table toward her friend, who picked it up and shot Karen a look.

"You're a very bad influence."

"Are you telling me that you didn't have just a little bottle of Jack in your desk drawer at Hogwarts or wherever it was you taught in England?"

She pursed her lips disapprovingly "Of course not. What a question." She took a swig of her beer "It was gin."

Karen smiled "Atta girl."

The warm breeze filtered through the open windows of the bar, bringing with it the wonderful scent of salt and sea air. The late September sun was setting over the horizon, the last dregs of light casting a warm orange glow over everything. The bar was busy; it always was during Happy Hour. The two women nodded at a couple of people they recognised from the teacher's lounge. Friday nights at the Darlington Arms pub were always the same – a mixture of shell-shocked teachers, the occasional local, and exhausted fishermen making their way up from the docks.

The pub itself was tucked away down several backstreets – no one could have found it unless they already knew it was there. She had been at the end of her first week at the school when Karen, having taken pity on her, had led her down the winding alleyways and small streets to the Darlington. She had felt as though she was being allowed into a special secret world where those who acted as upstanding gatekeepers of morality during the day knocked back hard liquor and swore. Loudly. That particular revelation had knocked her for six.

Of course, that probably had something to do with the fact that she had never taught in her life and her cover story about teaching General Studies at a posh private school in England was all an elaborate lie constructed by her bosses with the express purpose of infiltrating such a world.

Nothing she had ever been trained to do had prepared her for what she faced in the classroom day after day. Faced with a madman with a bomb strapped to him and thirty-four hostages, she was cool as a cucumber. Infiltrating and gathering intelligence on sex trafficking rings was a cinch. But ask her to explain Plato's puzzles or war poetry to a small group of indifferent adolescents with more money than sense, she went to pieces.

At least that was how it needed to look. And, like a divining rod to water, Karen had held out a wing under which the new girl happily pretended to shelter. She felt bad about deceiving Karen; after all, she was just an innocent bystander. But it was a means to an end. And now, nearly four months into her assignment, she felt as though she was finally making some headway.

There had been disappearances. Lots of disappearances. Always from expensive private schools in the UK and USA. It had been slow at first but had gained speed over the last year. The parents and families always found notes supposedly from the teenager explaining that they had run away and were never coming back. There were variations – they hated their families, they hated their lives, they had run away with a boyfriend or girlfriend and they didn't want to be found. There was never any ransom demand. Initially, both the FBI and MI6 wondered if the families were being blackmailed for chunks of their considerable income, but a close inspection of bank accounts showed no suspicious transactions or withdrawals.

The Socio-economic status of the families ensured that stories of the disappearances never hit the headlines. Most of the kids who had disappeared were set for Ivy League universities because of their family name and their parents simply couldn't allow for the scandal to ruin their reputations. In fact, many of the kids hadn't even been reported as missing to the police. When questioned by the school as to the whereabouts of their children, most of the parents had shrugged off their child's absence as a rebellious phase and written out a large donation cheque in order to ensure their silence. None of the kids had returned. None.

She had been approached to work undercover when MI6 honed in on a school in New England from which three of the disappearances had occurred. Her bosses thought that someone working in the school may have something to do with it. Her job was to examine the staff and keep a close eye on any of the students that may potentially be next to disappear, alerting her handler of anything suspicious that she uncovered. She had arrived in the wake of the most recent disappearance and immediately set about creating profiles of the staff and students.

"Do you think if I show the barman my bra he'll stop playing this _godawful_ music?" Karen's slurred words drew her from her reverie and she smiled at her friend.

"That's it. You're done. I'm taking you home."

"But I don't want to throw up yet."

"You'll thank me for that in the morning."

X

"So to finish, any ideas about what we discussed on Friday?" Once again, she was met with silence. She allowed it to hang in the air for a few seconds too long – she had learned that getting answers out of people was essentially a game of chicken. Leave an absence of sound hanging in the air and chances were someone would fill it.

The gambit paid off. A tentative hand was raised. She smiled "Yes, Holly?"

"I think it means that to discover things, you have to feel differently, not just see new stuff." Holly was a very pretty, blonde seventeen year old, popular with her fellow students but very much unlike them in one particular way – on occasion, the kid actually tried.

"Exactly!" she breathed an over-elaborate sigh of relief before glaring at the rest of the class "See? It's really not that difficult. You must see things differently, rather than see different things."

She was surprised when Holly approached her after the lesson "Do you believe that?"

"Believe what?"

"That thing you said about seeing things differently. Does that mean we should never see anything new?"

She frowned, trying to formulate an answer. It was rare that a student asked her to elaborate on a concept "No, I think sometimes it helps to go new places and experience new things. If you stay in one place forever then your view of the world tends to become narrow as a result. I think the point Proust is trying to make is that if you want to discover new things about yourself, then the journey starts with the way you look at things, not what you see."

"But new places could help me see things differently?"

She frowned "What are you getting at Holly?"

Holly seemed as though she was about to say something but then chose not to. She stood, small and skinny, clutching her books to her chest and shifting from foot to foot. She didn't seem nervous, but there was an alertness behind her eyes. She was thinking very hard. Eventually she smiled and shook her head.

"Nothing. I'm not getting at anything. Thanks."

After Holly had left, she made a mental note to find a list of all Holly's teachers or anyone who could be of significance to the girl. Her behaviour was new but worth keeping an eye on. School gossip (notoriously unreliable but free-flowing) indicated that the last three kids to disappear had started to behave strangely in the months leading up to dropping off the radar. It had been a long process. Her initial assessment of Holly concluded that there was nothing to worry about yet, but she made a mental note to alert her handler and get the family checked out anyway. She didn't think this girl was going anywhere anytime soon.

Which was why she nearly vomited when Karen, grey-faced and shaken collared her on the way into the teacher's lounge the next morning to tell her that Holly's parents had called the school. She had run away in the night, leaving only a note.

"This is the fourth kid to go missing in the last year." Karen paced up and down the lino in her classroom. She gestured vaguely toward her friend, sitting at a desk in the front row "Of course, you arrived after the last kid ran away so you wouldn't know..."

From her vantage point on the uncomfortable desk chair, she remembered that she wasn't supposed to know anything about the previous disappearances and shook her head "Were they all the same as this one?"

Karen nodded, knotting her hands "I always thought there was something weird going on after the second kid took off. I mean, one kid runs away it's a shame, two kids run away and then three and now four, you start thinking things, y'know?"

"What things, Karen?" she asked gently. Her friend took the desk next to her, leaning in close, a look of abject concern and anxiety in her eyes.

"That they might be being taken."

"By who?" She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the door was closed "Someone in the school?"

"I don't know, maybe." Karen ran her hands through her hair "But the police never get involved – the parent's don't want it. Too much scandal and humiliation. But someone needs to know about this. Needs to investigate."

"What are you suggesting, Kar?"

Karen bit her lip "I'm not sure. I've heard about a guy in Boston who doesn't work for the cops. But he can find things out. Maybe he can figure out where these kids are going. Figure out if somebody's responsible and get them caught. I'm going to see him."

"You can't." Her voice came out urgent and firm. Karen looked at her oddly.

"Why not?"

She thought quickly, her brain moving a mile a minute to fabricate an excuse "Because you don't know anything yet. Bringing in someone to investigate under your own steam can only get you in more trouble." She reached out and grabbed Karen's hand "Please say you'll think about this before schlepping all the way to Boston. For all you know, this guy could be a con artist."

"OK," Karen sank back in her seat, defeated "I'll think about it. But you have to admit that this is weird."

"Of course it's weird. But money makes people weird." She tried to be glib, but her heart was beating hard and fast. The last thing they needed was a private detective horning in and poking around what was rapidly becoming a very delicate situation.

X

_Two days later_

The phone was ringing.

It was still dark out, and her sleep had been so deep that the shrill ringing that disturbed her from it brought with it a nausea and grogginess that made her vision blur. Neglecting to turn on the light, she fumbled on the nightstand and eventually put her hands on the offending object.

"Hello?"

"Is this Penny Miller?" A man's voice barked down the line, accompanied by the intrusive sounds of the city.

"Yes, who are you?"

"I'm calling on your friend Karen's phone."

"Karen? Is she alright? What's going on?" she sat bolt upright in bed, suddenly wide awake an ice cold grip on her heart.

"Your friend came to me for help earlier today but as she was leaving she was hit by a car. I'm afraid she's been killed."

_Killed?_ Her mouth went dry. Heart thumping, she instinctively jumped out of bed and began pacing through the house, double checking the locks and making sure her gun was safely where she'd left it "Who the hell are you?"

"My name is Nathan Ford, and I will catch the people who did this."


End file.
